''Computers and Typesetting'' is a 5-volume set of books by
Donald Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer ...
published in 1986 describing the
TeX and
Metafont systems for
digital typography. Knuth's computers and typesetting project was the result of his frustration with the lack of decent software for the typesetting of mathematical and technical documents. The results of this project include TeX for typesetting, Metafont for
font
In movable type, metal typesetting, a font is a particular #Characteristics, size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "Sort (typesetting), sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of ...
construction and the
Computer Modern typefaces that are the default fonts used by TeX. In the series of five books Knuth not only describes the TeX and Metafont languages (volumes A and C), he also describes and documents the source code (in the
WEB
Web most often refers to:
* Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal
* World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system
Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to:
Computing
* WEB, a literate programming system created b ...
programming language) of the TeX and Metafont interpreters (volumes B and D), and the source code for the
Computer Modern fonts used by TeX (volume E). The book set stands as a tour de force demonstration of
literate programming
Literate programming is a programming paradigm introduced in 1984 by Donald Knuth in which a computer program is given as an explanation of its logic in a natural language, such as English, interspersed (embedded) with snippets of macros and t ...
.
The books themselves were typeset in the
Computer Modern Roman typeface using TeX; thus, in Knuth's words, they "belong to the class of sets of books that describe precisely their own appearance."
Volumes
The five volumes are published by Addison-Wesley.
#Volume A: The TeXbook. ''Describes the TeX typesetting language''. It is by far the most common and available of the set, as the TeX interpreter is widely used for typesetting. It is available in softcover (blue spiral-bound with a built-in flap for a bookmark) and hardcover
#Volume B: TeX: The program. ''A documented listing of the source code of the TeX interpreter'' The 1986 edition in hardcover is
#Volume C: The METAFONTbook. ''Describes the
METAFONT font description language.'' Hardcover , softcover .
#Volume D: Metafont: The program. ''A documented listing of the source code of the
Metafont interpreter.'' Hardcover , paperback
#Volume E: Computer Modern Typefaces. ''A character-by-character listing (in the
Metafont language) of the source code for the
Computer Modern typefaces (cmr, cmbx, cmti, etc.) used by TeX.'' Hardcover: , Softcover:
The set is also available as a hardcover boxed set with the latest editions as of the year 2000.
A jubilee edition of the Volumes A to D was published by Addison-Wesley in February 2021 incorporating all the changes made during the TeX tune-up of 2021. (Volume E remained unchanged from the 2017 edition.)
References
External links
*http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html
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1986 non-fiction books
Computer books
TeX
Typesetting software
Handbooks and manuals
Books by Donald Knuth
American non-fiction books